The Red Widow Murders (1935) by Carter Dickson

So the quality of detective fiction reviewed on here over the past two, three weeks have left something to be desired, even John Dickson Carr struggled to meet his own high standards in The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941), begging to be remedied by picking something good – which lead me right back to the master. Carr's The Red Widow Murders (1935), published as by "Carter Dickson," is the third novel starring Sir Henry Merrivale that marked the first time Carr applied his considerable plotting skills to the intriguing problem of a room-that-kills. I first read The Red Widow Murders in Merrivale Holds the Key: Two Classic Locked Room Mysteries (1995) and remember liking it without recalling too many details. Let's see how it stands up to a second read.

The Red Widow Murders begins, as so many of Carr's 1930s novels, by imagining London as a modern-day "Baghdad-on-the-Thames" where high adventure and strange mysteries awaits all who would seek it.

Dr. Michael Tairlaine had complained to Sir George Anstruther, Director of the British Museum, on the lack of adventure in his prim, buttoned-up life. So, one day, Sir George comes to Tairlaine with a somewhat unusual question, "do you believe... that a room can kill?" An unusual question coming with an even more unusual instrictions. Near eight that evening, Tairlaine has to be wandering the north side of Curzon Street wearing evening kit and keeping an eye out for "any sort of queer thing." When somebody approaches him with an odd remark or request, he has to agree or go along with it. That's how he eventually ends up at Mantling House to have dinner with Lord Mantling and partake in a possibly dangerous experiment. An experiment concerning a room, called the Widow's Room, that has been locked and sealed for sixty years. Not without reason.

During the 19th century, the room was the scene of four mysterious, often inexplicable deaths leaving its victims black in the face and no marks on their bodies. The room was turned inside out by architects and every stick of furniture and gimcrack was examined, taken apart or dissected by experts – none of whom found a poison-trap or hidden needles. When the grandfather of Alan Brixham, current Lord Mantling, become its fourth victim the room was permanently sealed. Lord Mantling ensured the room remained sealed by stating in his will nobody was allowed to enter the room until the house gets demolished. So now that the house had been sold and scheduled to be torn down, Lord Mantling takes the opportunity to test the room and has gathered a small dinner party. Afterwards, they're going to draw cards to decide who's going to spend two hours in the room-that-kills.

This party comprises of Lord Mantling's younger brother and family historian, Guy Brixham, and their elderly aunt, Miss Isabel Brixham. An old family friend by the name of Robert Carstairs and a French furniture dealer, Martin Longueval Ravelle, who's related to French expert who examined the furniture back in the 1800s. Ralph Bender is introduced as another of Isabel's protégés ("artist or something"). Sir Henry Merrivale is also present as an outside observer. This time, H.M. is in no mood for shenanigans or clowning around. H.M. is at his most serious here and fears the worst from this little game, but wants them "to play out this tomfool game" because he has no idea why he's so worried about what's going to happen next – only advising to let it alone without interfering. So a pack of cards, "new box, seal unbroken," is opened to draw cards to see which one of them is to die within two hours. Bender draws the ace of spades ("...some people would call that the death-card") and is left behind in the unsealed room at the end of a passage off the dining room. The rest remained in the dining room, sitting in full view of the passage's door, while occasionally calling out and getting answers. At the end of the two hours, the replies stopped and when they go inside they find Bender lying on the floor. Dead and black in the face from curare poison!

Somehow, someway, someone managed to jab a dose of the South American arrow-poison into Bender without leaving a fresh mark or scratch on him. In a room where the only door was watched, window covered with steel shutters "sealed with bolts rusted in the sockets" and a covered, soot chocked and impassable chimney. No secret passages or hidden doors. And, more importantly, not a hint of a long-forgotten, cleverly hidden poison-trap. What happened?

This is merely the setup of The Red Widow Murders, but what a killer setup! The problem is not only how the murderer transported a dose of curare into the victim's bloodstream, but who answered for Bender when he had been already dead? Why did the murderer leave behind the nine of spades and a strip of paper with an obscure phrase scribbled on it? And why take away Bender's notebook? Who had unsealed and cleaned out the passage and room before the party entered? What about the peculiar habit of the Widow's Room being "as harmless as a Sunday School" when it's occupied by more than one person, but kills anyone who's alone within two hours? Is there a madman in the family who already killed their pet parrot and fox-terrier? And how is any of it linked to Bender? H.M. eventually remarks, "I've met tricky murderers before, but Bender takes all prizes for being the trickiest corpse." Carr, H.M. and the corpse aren't the only ones who are in excellent form. Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, officially in charge, gets to show why he was introduced in The Plague Court Murders (1934) as the supernatural debunker of the London police with a wonderfully contrived, somewhat technical false-solution – complementing the ultimately simple and elegant solution. More on that in a moment.

It has been commented elsewhere that the book is perhaps a few chapters too long, which could have been trimmed down and one, or two, unnecessary characters cut. Nothing that bothered me personally. I enjoyed the historical excursion into the death room's backstory reaching all the way back to Revolutionary France and the household of Monsieur de Paris. Admittedly, the historical excursion here didn't quite enhance the overall story, like the Plague-Journal from The Plague Court Murders, but it's the kind of quality padding/storytelling frills I welcome. Even more so when Carr is doing the writing! Lay on that gloomy, historical atmosphere as thick as possible!

Speaking of frills, The Red Widow Murders has a mild, fascinating crossover element. Not enough to tag this post as a crossover mystery, but it's definitely there. Tairlaine and Sir George previously appeared in the standalone novel The Bowstring Murders (1933) in which the alcoholic John Gaunt solved an impossible murder at a haunted castle. Gaunt is not only mentioned ("I should like Gaunt's opinion"), but Tairlaine remembers Gaunt had mentioned H.M. "almost (for Gaunt) with admiration." Crossovers are my guilty pleasure and love these small, throwaway lines confirming an author's series-characters share the same world, but they also make me wish Golden Age crossovers were done more often. Gold was left on the table! By the way, Chapter Sixteen has a teaser of a footnote referring to the unrecorded case of "the singular puzzle of the triple impersonation" in the murder of the American millionaire, Richard Morris Blandon, at the Royal Scarlet Hotel in Piccadilly ("...a record which may one day be published"). You could easily fill a collection with pastiches of unrecorded cases from Carr's work covering everything from Dr. Fell's curious problem of the inverted room at Waterfall Manor and the H.M.'s Royal Scarlet case to Colonel March's unrecorded cases of the walking corpse and the thief who only steals green candles. Anyway, back to The Red Widow Murders.

The Red Widow Murders is an intricately-plotted, beautifully layered locked room mystery which doesn't neglect providing the skillfully hidden murderer with a worthy and somewhat unusual motive. Not to mention the brilliantly handled, apparently messy, second murder or the shocking explanation to the problem of answers coming from a room occupied by a corpse. Every nook and corner of the story is crammed with clues and red herrings. A vintage JDC!! So, if there's anything to be said against The Red Widow Murders, it's that it still feels like it's a step below Carr's more celebrated works like The Three Coffins (1935), The Judas Window (1938), The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) and Till Death Do Us Part (1944). That can be entirely placed on the simple, elegant solution to the impossible poisoning. A solution that's perhaps a little too simple, too elegant for the murderer's purpose to be entirely convincing in the end. Simply put, this is another case of the false-solution ending up outshining the real solution as Masters going full John Rhode on the locked room puzzle of a room-that-kills was quite fun. Other than not being a full-blown, uncontested genre classic, The Red Widow Murders is a fine showcase why the period between 1934 and 1937 is generally regarded as the zenith of the Golden Age, when the detective story shined at its brightest. So exactly what I was looking for.

So immediately wanted to take a gamble with a murky, obscure mystery-thriller from the 1920s, but changed my mind. Tom Mead introduced the 2023 American Mystery Classic edition of The Red Widow Murders. So why not follow it up with Mead's Cabaret Macabre (2024). You're next, Mead!

Gray Tones: The Case of the Elevator Slaying (2017) by R.L. Akers

R.L. Akers is a self-styled, self-published storyteller who authored several science-fiction novels and short story collections blending science-fiction with thriller elements, but, more importantly, Akers wrote a short series of detective novellas – published between 2017 and 2018. A series covering half a dozen novellas blending classically-styled plots with the contemporary police procedural and cop dramas.

Gray Tones: The Case of the Elevator Slaying (2017) is the first title introducing the series protagonist, Grayson "Gray" Gaynes, who's a NYPD detective third grade and typical, troubled cop of today's crime fiction. More on that in a moment. The Case of the Elevator Slaying is one of 571 works to come out of the first round of nominations for the "New Locked Room Library" organized by The Detection Collection blog. However, The Case of the Elevator Slaying is not a locked room mystery or impossible crime story. No idea why or who nominated it. Even more surprising, I ended up being more intrigued by Gaynes and his backstory than the plot itself.

The setting of the story is the Harkley Building, "an aging low-rise apartment building," which becomes the scene of a gruesome, double murder when the elderly couple of Ellis and Kathryn Howell get beaten to death inside the elevator – now painted red with their blood. Fortunately, the murderer is easily identified as their next door neighbor, Barton Chan, who was seen exiting the elevator covered in blood. What's more, the murders were caught on the elevator's security camera. So an uncomplicated, clear cut case and exactly what Gray needed on his first day back on the job ("combination medical leave and bereavement"). Gray wanted "to get some sense of motive" to understand why Chan snapped and sticks around the apartment building to continue digging. That... and another reason.

This is where the story splits in two. For me, anyway. On the one hand, the setup is fascinating and assumed the impossibility wasn't a double murder in closed and locked elevator, but proving Chan's innocence, which didn't turn out to be the case. The solution to the murders and why, or rather how, Chan snapped is pulpy at best and incredibly hokey at worst (SPOILER/ROT13: V pna'g oryvrir vg'f abg ulcabgvfz!). And the culprit is not difficult to spot. On the other hand, Aker planted his clues fairly and the underpinning motive is original. By the end, I was more intrigued how Gray was going to tackle his next case. I'm normally not too keen on the troubled cop trope, but if you're going to do and stack the odds against him, you might as well make a thorough job of it. So that's enough to warrant a return to the series, but have two even better reasons.

Firstly, The Case of the Elevator Slaying pleasantly reminded me of the detective fiction of Dutch mystery writer M.P.O. Books (a.k.a. "Anne van Doorn"), e.g. "Het lijk dat aan de wandel ging" ("The Corpse That Went For a Walk," 2019) and Het Delfts blauw mysterie (The Delft Blue Mystery, 2023). Second, the reviews of the next three, or so, novellas sound positively intriguing with a potential modern-day impossible crime/how-was-it-done classic. Stephen Pierce praised Gray Matter: The Case of the Autonomous Assassination (2018) as rivaling "some Golden Age novels in how it forces you to accept an unbelievable narrative—just trade the local ghost for a homicidal AI" and the To Solve a Mystery blog called it "a good reminder that mysteries utilizing technology aren't impossible." So, at the very least, this series is going to contribute to that future addendum to "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century."

Golden Age Whodunits (2024) edited by Otto Penzler

Golden Age Whodunits (2024), edited by Otto Penzler, is the fourth anthology in the American Mystery Classics series and previously reviewed Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries (2022), which unfortunately consisted mostly of short stories already collected in other locked room-themed anthologies – several having appeared together in Tantalizing Locked Room Mysteries (1982). So the selection of stories left me a little salty and you can taste it in the review. A review that wasn't appreciated by everyone at the time.

Fortunately, the content of this latest anthology looked a lot more promising and enticing. I've only read four five, of the fifteen, short stories collected in Golden Age Whodunits. And discussed two of those four stories, Clayton Rawson's "The Clue of the Tattooed Man" (1946) and Fredric Brown's "Crisis, 1999" (1949), in past blog-posts. I'll be skipping those two stories. Still more than enough newish material to warrant a read that will hopefully translate into a review with lower salt levels. Let's find out!

The first short story is Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Amateur of Crime," originally published in the April, 1927, issue of The American Magazine, which begins during Mrs. Culverin's house party at her Long Island home and she has gathered a who's who of guests – everyone from a cinema star and Olympic athlete to Ruritanian dignitaries. Peter Scarlet is a pink-cheeked youth whose enormous, horn-rimmed spectacles "gave him much of the innocent downiness of a very young owl” and his hobby enlivened the sagging house party. Scarlet is the amateur of crime privately studying "the queer kinds of people who are murderers" or "the even queerer kinds who are murderees" ("the people who seem just born and bound to be murdered"). Mrs. Culverin's house party is going to give him an opportunity to put his theory into practice when Prince Mirko, of Ruritania, is stabbed to death in his locked suite under impossible circumstances.

G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown series clearly modeled for "The Amateur of Crime" and Peter Scarlet. Benét wrote a short story that often feels like a Chestertonian detective story, particularly the opening stages and the character of Scarlet, but the disappointing solution is exactly the kind of second-and third-rate tripe Chesterton shepherded the genre. Baffingly, Benét did nothing with Scarlet's study of murderers and their murderees. So not a very promising beginning to this anthology.

Anthony Boucher comes to the rescue with "Black Murder," originally published in the September, 1943, issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and collected in Exeunt Murderers (1983), which is where I first read it. However, I didn't remember having read this before until Nick Noble came into the story. A once promising, young homicide devoted to both his job and wife, but "when both were gone, there was nothing left" except "cheap sherry that dulled the sharpness of reality enough to make it bearable" – while his mind and reasoning skills remained razor sharp. A mind that can trace patterns in chaos. So helps out his former colleagues on occasion, like a barroom detective, for booze money ("Screwball Division... they called him"). This time, Detective Lieutenant Donald MacDonald is investigating the attempted poisoning of a naval inventor, Harrison Shaw, who was working a sub detector. Only person who could have administrated the poison is his own mother and MacDonald doesn't buy it. So goes to the Chula Negra Café, headquarters of the Screwball Division, where Noble makes short work of the case, but they get surprise when the inventor is still gruesomely murdered. And, whoever slit his throat, drew a bloody swastika on the wall. Noble simply solves this second part of the case by pointing out that swastika drawing points to only one of the suspects. I liked how the solution delivered on the promise of the story's opening line, "in peacetime the whole Shaw case could never have happened." A solid short story from an even better, regrettably short-lived series.

Mignon G. Eberhart's "The Flowering Face" was first published in the May, 1935, issue of The Delineator and collected in Dead Yesterday and Other Stories (2007). This story features Susan Dare, a young mystery novelist, who's wrested away from her fictional murders to join a party on a mountain hike to the inn at the top. There the announcement of an engagement becomes "the focus of a queer, dreadful quarrel" ending with someone dead at the bottom of a ravine. Was it an accident or a cleverly engineered murder? The murderer is apparent halfway through the story, but then it becomes a question how it was done as everyone was inside arguing. A soundly constructed, quasi-impossible crime around a well-realized outdoors setting recalling the mountaineering howdunits of Glyn Carr. I enjoyed it.

The next short story comes from a "Literary Visitor" to the crime-and detective genre, F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose short story "The Dance" first appeared in the June, 1926, issue of The Red Book Magazine. The story has the narrator recalling a trip to the southern cotton mill town of Davis where she "saw the surface crack for a minute and something savage, uncanny, and frightening rear its head" – before "the surface closed again." It boils down to flirtatious love affairs boiling over into murder during a dance party and the narrator solves the fatal shooting in the women's dressing room, but "The Dance" is closer to a social crime story than a detective story proper with the local's searching for the shooter among the black population of the town ("...instant and unquestioned assumption"). So not a bad short story, but neither is it a Golden Age detective story.

Penzler wrote in the introduction that a 13-year-old Fitzgerald wrote a short detective story, "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage," which actually got published in the September, 1909, issue of Now and Then. So poked around a bit and found something interesting: "The Mystery of the Raymond Mortgage" would "likely have remained a mysterious footnote in Fitzgerald's bibliography, were it not for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine." EQMM saved it from obscurity by reprinting it in their March, 1960, issue. A shame its early, pre-GAD publication date precluded inclusion here as it sounds like a fun, Doylean-style mystery, but perhaps something for a future anthology entitled Gaslit Whodunits.

C. Daly King's "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion," originally published in the February, 1935, issue of Mystery under the title "Invisible Terror,' is a gem of an impossible crime story! Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries has King's most well-known short story in the Mr. Tarrant series, "The Episode of the Nail and the Requiem" (1935), but it's overrated and suggested "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" would have been a better pick. And here we are!

After recovering from a mental breakdown, Valerie Mopish moved with her brother, John, to Norrisville where they built a new, modernistic house on a remote piece of ground without a shred of history attached to it. So no ghost haunts the Mopish house, which means Valerie's delusions and hallucations have returned. She begins to see and hear things when alone in the house. Such as footsteps following her around. And, fearing she's going mad again, she refuses to marry Jerry Phelan. Not until she knows there isn't "something funny" about her. Jerry stays the night to guard the house against prowling tramps, noisy ghosts or simple delusions, but gets to meet the invisible intruder. Jerry is followed up the stairs by clear, unmistakable pounding footsteps ("heavy and solid"), but, when he turned around, the stairs behind him were "absolutely empty." Next thing that happens is Valerie getting pushed down a flight of stairs when "there was no person, nor anything else, near her." This is enough for Jerry to get in a specialist and turns to the ever curious, Mr. Tarrant and returns to the house with his manservant, Katoh, but the night only brings another ghostly impossibility to light. Surprisingly, Tarrant concludes that "there is no mechanical contrivance in the entire house in any way connected with the phenomena." So what caused the phenomena? Could a modern, 1930s house really be haunted?

The impossibility of phantom footfalls is a neat variation on the no-footprints scenario, which has been sporadically explored in such stories as Anthony Wynne's "Footsteps" (1926) to Edward D. Hoch's "The Stalker of Souls" (1989), but never as good as "The Episode of the Tangible Illusion" – on a whole a very original take on the haunted house detective story. I'm thinking it's time to place The Complete Curious Mr. Tarrant (2003) on the reread pile.

Ring Lardner's "Haircut," originally published in the March 28, 1925, issue of Liberty Magazine, is, as the introduction points out, "not a typical mystery story." Lardner was famous as a sports writer and humorist who penned a darkly humorous story presented as a string of anecdotes told by a barber cutting a new customer. The anecdotes revolves around the exploits of the small town's cruel jester, Jim Kendall, who would have made a fascinating study subject for Peter Scarlet from Benét's "The Amateur of Crime." So, of course, Kendall gets hoisted on his own petard. A bleak, darkly humorous criminal anecdote and a welcome surprise to find in this anthology.

Stuart Palmer's "Fingerprints Don't Lie" was first published in the November, 1947, issue of EQMM and one of the Miss Hildegarde Withers short stories I hadn't read yet. Miss Withers was on her way to California for a holiday when her friends of the New York police at Centre Street asks her to look into a missing person, Eileen Travis. She's supposed to be living there to establish residence for a Nevada divorce. And her husband, recently indicted for black market shenanigans, has uttered some treats. Miss Withers arrives on the scene of a gruesome shotgun killing and, before too long, another murder discovered. This time, the victim has an icepick planted between his shoulders. Fortunately, the murderer left fingerprints on the murder weapons ("...the prints on the icepick matched the prints on the shotgun..."), but they "can't find any suspect whose prints fit those on the murder weapons." Palmer is a personal favorite and think Miss Withers is the best spinster sleuth the Golden Age has produced, but this short story is definitely a low-point in the series. The solution to the fingerprints is carny, not the good kind, which is trotted out in the last line as a "tadaah, surprise!" However, it outright ignores the incredible difficulty to use that trick to shoot someone in the face with a shotgun or the outright impossibility to stab someone in the back with it. Unworthy of Palmer and Miss Withers!

Shockingly, I didn't hate the next story. I'm not a fan of Melville Davisson Post nor understand the (once) classical status of stories like "The Doomdorf Mystery" (1914) or why S.S. van Dine, Ellery Queen and Howard Haycraft tried to prop him up as America's answer to G.K. Chesterton and Father Brown – which couldn't be further from the truth. Every story I've read by Post was a poor specimen of the detective story often with "borrowed" plot ideas. "The Doomdorf Mystery" reportedly lifted the central idea from M. McDonnell Bodkin's "Murder by Proxy" (1897), "The Bradmoor Murder" (1925) took its cue from a famous Sherlock Holmes story and "The Hidden Law" (1914) bad and boring. So gave it half a thought to simply skip this story, but decided to give it a try. And, surprisingly, found a very decently done courtroom procedural.

Post's "The Witness in the Metal Box," originally published in the November, 1929, issue of The American Magazine, concerns a contested will. Alexander Harrington was supposed to have died intestate, "leaving his great properties to pass by operation of law to his daughter," but a holograph will was found leaving everything to his younger brother ("...some minor provisions for the daughter"). What gave the testament the stamp of authenticity is the signature ("that big arabesque of a scrawl could not be imitated"). Colonel Braxton, "no knight-errant for romance," is the eccentric lawyer representing the daughter. But he brought no witnesses or experts to testify. Only a small, circular metal box and curious questions about farming to win the case ("this Colonel Braxton was the magician out of a storybook"). I never thought I would say this about a short story penned by Melville Davisson Post, but "The Witness in the Metal Box" is not bad at all.

Ellery Queen's "Man Bites Dog" first appeared in the June, 1939, issue of Blue Book and collected in The New Adventures of Ellery Queen (1940), which is where I first read it, but remembered next to nothing about the story or plot. The story finds Queen working in Hollywood and itching the return to New York where "the New York Giants and the New York Yankees are waging mortal combat to determine the baseball championship of the world" ("ever missed a New York series before"). Miss Paula Paris, celebrated gossip columnist, ensures he gets to see the championship match together Inspector Richard Queen and Sgt. Velie. During the game, the ex-baseball pitcher Big Bill Tree is poisoned while watching the game. While not the most challenging of short stories this series has produced, the solution to the poisoning has a satisfying little twist. However, the most interesting part of the story is the character of Ellery Queen himself.

It has been pointed out before that the Ellery Queen in this short story is nothing like the book collecting, pince-nez-wearing Philo Vance clone who was introduced in The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) a decade earlier. You can't imagine the Queen from the international series getting annoyed at a murder interrupting his baseball game and only given the case half his attention, while keeping another eye on the game. That being said, I think "Man Bites Dog" could have been adapted into a tremendous episode for the 1975 Ellery Queen TV series. I couldn't help but imagine Jim Hutton, David Wayne and Tom Reese playing the parts of EQ, Inspector Queen and Sgt. Velie here.

"The Phonograph Murder," originally published in the January 25, 1947, issue of Collier's, is Helen Reilly's only short story on record. This story is an inverted detective story. George Bonfield is the complacent, browbeaten husband of Louise who realizes one evening he really hates her guts. The catalyst is his aunt's bequest coming due in three months and his wife tells him colorful details how she intends to spend the money ("she went on, devouring his $30,000 endowment to the last crumb"). A broken timer on the gas stove gives him an idea how to get rid of his wife and provide himself with an incontestable alibi, or so he hopes. The case of the apparently botched burglary is in the hands of Inspector Christopher McKee of the Manhattan Homicide Squad. Not that this case needed a great detective as Bonfield folds at the first small bump in the road and obligingly confesses. So a weak ending to a story that started out strong.

Mary Roberts Rinehart's "The Lipstick," originally published in the July, 1942, issue of Cosmopolitan, brings some mild suspense to this anthology. Elinor Hammond had fallen from the tenth-floor window of her psychiatrist's waiting room, but did she take her own life or was she pushed? Her younger cousin, Miss Louise Baring, believes she was murdered and takes it upon herself to find the murderer. Not merely because her mother threatens to stop her allowance for trying to stir up scandal. Not bad, on a whole, but not really my thing either.

Vincent Starrett's "Too Many Sleuths," originally published in the October, 1927, issue of Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, is the longest story in this anthology and loosely based on the real-life Oscar Slater case – similar to D. Erskine Muir's Five to Five (1934). This time, the victim is the elderly, jumpy Miss Harriet Lambert "who is constantly afraid that something is going to happen to her." So she locked herself away in her apartment with her collection of brooches, rings, and pendants against "the bloody terrors that filled the outside world." Unfortunately, for Miss Lambert, one of those bloody horrors got pass the patent spring lock on the door and bludgeoned her to death. Frederick Dellabough, roving crime reporter of the Morning Telegram, is on the case and he has access to his own armchair detective, G. Washington Troxell. A bibliophile, bookseller and amateur detective who work together like Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe ("I'm Dellabough's brain. Dellabough, to put it in another way, is my legs"). The first lead is the man who was seen casually leaving the scene of the crime after saying goodbye to the corpse. A man who may be named Otto Sandow or Oscar Slaney and they may, or not may, be one and the same person. Just one of the many complications that include other people who think they got hold of the answer.

A very well written, Wolfean-style detective story predating Stout's Nero Wolfe series by a good eight years! Regrettably, the solution is plain and unremarkable next to the elaborate misdirection and dead ends involving mixed identifies, a pawn ticket and too many sleuths. A stronger, more inspired solution could have turned this into a small gem.

T.S. Stribling's "A Passage to Benares," first published in the February 20, 1926, issue of Adventure, closes out this anthology, but have nothing much to say about it. Dr. Henry Poggioli, the American psychologist and consulting detective, is in the Port of Spain, Trinidad, when he asked to investigate a murder at a Hindu temple. A young bride had been found decapitated and a group of beggars were found sleeping nearby carrying items of the murdered bride, but the widowed groom is also under suspicion. However, this story is an exercise in style over substance. From the local color and dream analyzes to the final line. A travelogue trying to be a regional mystery, which only succeeded in making me appreciate S.H. Courtier and Arthur W. Upfield all the more.

So not a great closer to Golden Age Whodunits, but, on a whole, I thought the selection an improvement over Golden Age Locked Room Mysteries. Not every pick is a classic of the short story form, some were just bad or disappointing, but greatly enjoyed the stories from Boucher, Eberhart, King and Queen with the stories by Lardner and Post being welcome surprises. So the usual mixed bag of tricks, but a mixed bag with something for everyone.

The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) by John Dickson Carr

John Dickson Carr's The Case of the Constant Suicides (1941) is the thirteenth novel in the Dr. Gideon Fell series, which is one of his signature locked room mysteries, but stands out due to having no less than three impossible murders – disguised as apparent suicides. Unlike the locked room specialists of today, Carr rarely included more than one impossibility in his stories and even rarer more than two. The Case of the Constant Suicides is an exception in that regard on top of being one of Carr's shortest novels that introduced me to Carr and Dr. Gideon Fell. And believe the first that made me aware of what, exactly, a locked room mystery is.

However, The Case of the Constant Suicides didn't convince me at the time that Carr was the greatest mystery writer who ever lived, but you can blame that on the cover of the Dutch translation strongly hinting at a key-part of the solution (i.e. practically giving it away). I also hate the Dutch title, De moordenaar was een Schot (The Murderer Was a Scot). Why not something like De familie die zichzelf vernietigde (The Family That Destroyed Itself)? Anyway, enough time has passed for a second read. This time in English.

The Case of the Constant Suicides begins with Alan Campbell, a youngish professor of history, boarding a train bound for Scotland where has been summoned to attend family business concerning his late uncle, Angus Campbell – who recently died under questionable circumstances. Not that Alan has ever heard of Uncle Angus or Castle of Shira on Lock Fyne. Alan is not the only distant relative summoned or the only Campbell on the train. When returning to his compartment, Alan finds a pretty woman, Kathryn Campbell, who's not only a fellow historian but a distant cousin. So they end up having to share the compartment and sit up all night as there are no other compartments available, which in 1941 was open to misinterpretation and gossip. Which sets the surprisingly comedic tone for a story taking place in a gloomy, Scottish "castle." More on that in a moment.

When they arrive, Alan and Kathryn find out that the death of Angus Campbell caused some problems. The family lawyer, Alistair Duncan, is arguing with Walter Chapman, of the Hercules Insurance Company, over Angus' life insurance policies. Several of them constituting the whole of his assets ("the whole of them, sir") which naturally came with iron-clad suicide clauses. And it has all the appearance that he committed suicide.

Angus usually slept in a room at the top of the house's tower, "sixty-two feet high" with "conical roof of slippery slate," where he leaped from the window in the middle of the night and only found the following morning at the foot of the tower – leaving behind an empty room locked and bolted from the inside. The window is, of course, completely inaccessible. So a clear case of suicide, but what about the empty dog carrier found in the room? Something that definitely wasn't there before he locked himself in? And that's from it! The nearly 90-year-old Aunt Elspat, "supposed to be rather a terror," is a loyal reader of the Daily Floodlight (“that filthy scandal-sheet”) and asked a reporter to come down to Shira because to make some "sensational disclosures" regarding a murder. The reporter in question, Charles Swan, proves to be a pain in the neck for Alan and Kathryn. Swan overheard their historical discussion in their train compartment and completely misinterpreted it ("who is this dame from Cleveland, anyhow?"). And, on the night of the murder, Angus received a visitor, Alec Forbes, in his tower room. Forbes, who fancies himself an inventor, collaborated with Angus on a wildcat scheme with predicable, disastrous results. So he came to have it out with Angus in private, but what happened with the inventor since then? This is still only the beginning of this very short novel.

Like I said, The Case of the Constant Suicides is not only one of Carr's shortest novels and surprisingly comedic in tone considering the Dr. Fell series abandoned the farcical comedy of The Blind Barber (1934) in favor of darker, more serious tone. Carr carried the Punch and Judy slapstick and chase comedy over to the Sir Henry Merrivale series, published under his "Carter Dickson" penname, but the humor here is not the usual hit-or-miss, Punch and Judy slapstick comedy. There are some off-page drunken antics with claymores and shotguns, but it's mostly the type of situational comedy associated today with classic British comedy series. Carr obviously was a better mystery writer/plotter than a comedian and his attempts at comedy either works (The Punch and Judy Murders, 1936) or dies a death (The Eight of Swords, 1934), but here it definitely worked and makes the story standout more than the plot itself. For example, I really enjoyed the story's opening in which Alan recounted his feud in the Sunday Watchman with an author who had a problem with his book review to finding another Campbell in his train compartment.

However, the plot is, uncharacteristically of Carr, very uneven. Firstly, there are the two impossible falls from the tower. The second victim is Angus' brother and heir, Dr. Colin Campbell, who decides the spend the night in the room after a ghost is seen standing in the window and is seriously wounded when he falls out of the window during the night. The solution to the (attempted) murders in the tower is ingeniously simple and particularly the role of the empty dog carrier found inside the room. Something that should have reeked of the worst of the pulps, but convincingly presented and handled. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about the third, entirely different, locked room situation. Dr. Gideon Fell finds one of his potential suspects dangling from a rope at a remote cottage, bolted from the inside and windows covered with a wire mesh, but the locked room-trick is shockingly second-rate – begging the question why Carr even bothered to make it a locked room mystery. I lavished praise in the past on Carr's nearly unmatched skills to rub the truth in your eyes with one hand and pull the wool over your eye with the other (e.g. The Problem of the Green Capsule, 1939), but even that was uneven and a little spotty. I know that's not a widely held opinion.

I admit that the casually uttered line (SPOILER/ROT13), “uvpu Pnzcoryy ner lbh,” is a brilliantly delivered clue, but didn't think the clueing or misdirection was, on a whole, up to Carr's usual high standards. And the identity of the murderer is, perhaps, a bit too obscure. I actually remembered (ROT13) Fjna jnf gur zheqrere naq gur fprar jvgu gur cubgbtencu nyohz nccrnerq gb fhccbeg zl fubqql zrzbel. Jul ryfr pnhfr fhpu na boivbhf qvfgenpgvba jura rirelbar jnf jngpuvat ng n cvpgher bs Eboreg Pnzcoryy, “Pevcrf, jung n ornhgl! Jub'f gur tbbq-ybbxvat jbzna?” Once again, I know I'm in the minority here and The Case of the Constant Suicides is not a bad detective novel. On the contrary. It's one of Carr's best paced, tightly packaged detective novels with some genuinely funny humor and character interactions, but plot-wise, not anywhere near as good as some of Carr's better (known) work. Carr has written at least twenty, or so, mysteries that I would pick for a top 20, before The Case of the Constant Suicides would come up for consideration. Once again, not a bad detective novel, one that would have perhaps worked better as a standalone, but not a bad locked room mystery. And had someone else's name been on the cover, I would probably regard a bit more highly. But have come to expect better from the grandmaster himself.

So, yeah, a John Dickson Carr review not thick with praise or hero worship. No wonder it reads back like a mess. Well, more messy than usual. I'm in new territory here and feel like I should do some kind penance to wash away the sin and exorcise those impure thoughts. Maybe I'll revisit one of the early Merrivale novels sometime soon.

Read All About It: "The Late Edition" (1928) by Kelman Frost

Kelman Dalgety Frost was a prolific British writer of fiction who wrote his first published story in the trenches during the First World War, aged sixteen, which started a fifty-year career as a professional storyteller – estimated to have "written almost 70 million words of fiction." Frost contributed prolifically to the popular boys' papers and pulp magazines of the day in addition to penning numerous westerns for children like Terror at Nameless Creek (1965) and Hoofbeats on the Prairie (1966).

Despite his prolific output and reaching five million readers, when D.C. Thomson's boys' story papers were at their peak, Frost is barely remembered today. And most of his output is, sort of, lost. A lot of Frost's work was published anonymously and largely disappeared, uncredited, in the murky maze of early twentieth century magazine publications. And his novels didn't fare much better. Frost reportedly wrote over forty children's adventure books, but less than twenty have been identified. Nor has his brief dalliance with the detective genre weathered the passage of time gracefully.

Death Registers at the Eagle Arms (1947), a charming, uncomplicated mystery, is practically forgotten with copies having become scarce and ridiculous expensive, but Frost's second mystery novel, Something Scandalous at Lilac Cottage, apparently never made it to print – only announced by the Oberon Press as "in preparation." Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991) lists one of Frost's many obscure short stories, however, the locked room-angle of Death Registers at the Eagle left me unimpressed. So the short story dropped on the locked room priority list, until recently. More on that in a moment.

Kelman Frost's "The Late Edition" was originally published in the March, 1928, issue of Clues, reprinted in Hutchinson's Adventure & Mystery Story Magazine and finally collected in The Best English Detective Stories of 1928 (1929).

"The Late Editions" begins with Sergeant Gosling, of the Swinwood Police, out on patrol when sees young Malcolm Lovibond coming down from London in his two-seater to see his father ("...the old skinflint"). Several minutes later, Lovibond is back to ask the Gosling to come back to the home, because something appears to have happened to his father. Lovibond arrived at the house to find no trace of his father, until he noticed a very strong smell of gas coming from under the kitched door. However, the door was locked from the inside.

So they go to the house together to break down the door and find the body of James Lovibond lying on the kitchen floor with his head stuck inside the oven. The kitchen door was locked from the inside and a thick mat was pushed up against the wide crack at the bottom of the door, while the backdoor is locked and bolted and the windows securely shuttered. Every other crack or opening of the backdoor and shuttered windows had been "crammed tightly with rolled newspapers in order to make it air-tight" and "a big ball of rolled up newspapers had been thrust into the chimney opening." A clear case of suicide until Dr. Francis Farrar, "a middle-aged practitioner who was comparatively new to Swinwood," arrived on the scene.

Dr. Farrar must have been aware he's playing the role of detective in a short story, because he makes a mad dash towards the ending the moment he arrived. From his preliminary investigation to apprehending the murderer, which is the most amusing part of the story. And finally explain the whole thing to the baffled Sergeant Gosling ("but it was a plain case of suicide, doctor"). So not much detection or fair play in this crime story with a locked room hook. However, "The Late Edition" has an admirably layered plot for a 1920s short story. The murderer and motive are obvious, of course, but the how also concerned a cleverly arranged alibi reinforced by locked room setup suggesting suicide. And pointing out the fatal mistakes the murderer made along the way (ROT13: "...gung cncre unf n ybg gb nafjre sbe... gung cncre'f tbvat gb unat lbh").

So about that locked room setup and trick. This short story came back to my attention following a comment on my review of Ooyama Seiichiro's short story "Kanojo ga Patience wo korosu hazu ga nai" ("She Wouldn't Kill Patience," 2002). Stephen M. Pierce commented that he was working on a "Top 5 Taped Room Mysteries." Being the incorrigible impossible crime fanboy that I'm, the list doubled in size in mere minutes and promised to keep an eye out for other “tape tomb” short stories and novels. I remembered "The Late Edition" centered on a gassing inside a locked room and decided to track it down to see if it qualifies, because it would have been the earliest known "taped tomb" on record, but doubt Stephen will accept a room only partially "sealed" with newspapers – nor would he rank it very highly. The locked room-trick is minor and routine. Something that gets rejected as soon as it's suggested in today's locked room mysteries. But, on a whole, not a bad crime story for 1928. Still perfectly readable today.

Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars (1996) by Jun Kurachi

Last month, I reviewed Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002), which came out of the first round of nominations for the new, up-to-date "Locked Room Library" and turned out to be available as a fanlation – translated by Mitsuda Madoy and "cosmiicnana." The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders takes place in different time periods and places littered with seemingly impossible decapitations grandly tied together in the end. I summed it up as utterly insane in the most flattering sense of the word. So was curious to see what else they had translated and one title stood out. Surprisingly, it's not a locked room mystery or impossible crime novel!

I read about Jun Kurachi's Hoshifuri sansou no satsujin (Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars, 1996) when Ho-Ling Wong reviewed it back in 2021. Ho-Ling praised Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars as "a fantastic example of the logic school of mystery writing" that "challenges the reader to logically infer who the murderer is." The challenges begin the moment you open the book with each, lengthy chapters title summarizing what's going to happen in that chapter. For example, the first chapter is titled "First, we are introduced to the main character. The protagonist is the viewpoint character, or, alternatively, the Watson. In other words, they shall share all information they possess with the reader. They cannot be the culprit." Every other chapter ends with helpful pointer or comment like "there's important foreshadowing here" or "pay attention." That sure sounds suspiciously considerate and needlessly helpful. Surely, Kurachi isn't going to lie through his teeth by strictly speaking the truth? Let's find out!

Kazuo Sugishita, the Watson of the story, works for the Production Department of Century Ad, but, after a work floor related incident with an assistant manager, Sugishita is temporarily moved to the Culture and Creative Department as a manager-in-training – except his duties turn out to be of an attendant. Shiro Hoshizono, the detective of the story, is a dandy, pompous self-styled Star Watcher, "he celebrated the beauty of the stars, talked about the night sky," whose books, horoscopes and TV shows are tremendously popular with the female demographic. A rising star developed in-house, but Sugishita thinks of Hoshizono as "an annoyance and a creep." However, Sugishita's first job as Hoshizono's attendant is accompanying him to a remote campground deep in the snowy mountains of Saitama Prefecture.

Century Ad also has a finger in the real estate business and is working together with a development company to redevelop the recently acquired Togaridake Lodge Village. A poorly thought out, ill-fated business venture that had gone bust due to its remoteness and lack of a special attractions. So the President of Yamakanmuri Development, Gozo Iwagishi, brings a select group to the campground to look over the lodges and spit balling ideas for a new concept to attract tourists. Akane Kusabuki, a popular romance author, and her secretary, Asako Hayasawa. Kazuteru Sagashima is a full-time UFO researcher who believes there's an alien base hidden somewhere deep in the mountains of Chichibu. Yumi Kodaira and Mikiko Ohinata are two college students who jumped on the opportunity to meet a couple of celebrities. And, of course, Sugishita and Hoshizono.

So the plan is to spend the night at, the soon to be renamed, Togaridake Lodge Village and brainstorming to make the impoverished-looking, desolate square of lodged and its two-story main building both appealing and profitable ("home of stars, romance, and UFOs"). Like having one of Akane Kusabuki's romance novels take place at the future star resort or a planetarium with recordings of Hoshizono lecturing on the constellations peppered with discussions on extraterrestrial visitors ("...did you know there are fragments of an enormous UFO mothership scattered in orbit?").

Kurachi takes his time working towards the murder, roughly the first-half, but everything leading up the murder is full with important information, clues, red herrings and foreshadowing – exactly as promised on the can (i.e. chapter titles). On the following morning, they find the beaten, strangled body of Gozo Iwagishi lying on the floor of his lodge. There are no phone lines and nobody brought along the cell phones on top of a minor avalanche that made the road below impassable. And, when they turn on the television, they learn a raging snowstorm has paralyzed the entire region with emergency services being overstretched. So the group is stranded for the time being, short on supplies and one of them is a murderer.

Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars has all the appearance of an extremely conventional whodunit, which has has a very obvious purpose. Kurachi basically removed all the short cuts.

I recently reviewed Seishi Yokomizo's Akuma no temari uta (The Little Sparrow Murders, 1957/59) and noted that it read more like a Western-style, Golden Age mystery than what we have come to expect from the recent run (shin) honkaku translations. Yokomizo simply wanted to read a Western-style mystery a la Agatha Christie and simply had no need for locked rooms, corpse-puzzles and other plot-oriented tropes. My love for these things have been well documented (fortunately, not by a psychiatrist), but it has to admitted that something like a locked room murder, dying message or a corpse cut to pieces often present a short cut to the solution or important parts of the solution – if you know the how it was done, you often know who done it. For example, I figured out the solution to Tetsuya Ayukawa's short story "Akai misshitsu" ("The Red Locked Room," 1954) because the murderer left a dismembered body inside a locked mortuary. Kurachi seems to have eschewed all the usual shin honkaku tropes, or short cuts, on purpose in order to make the whole thing as difficult as possible.

Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars has no locked room murders, dying clues, bombproof alibis, corpse-puzzles or a trail of bodies following a rhyming scheme. Just a small group of people in the middle of nowhere, cut off from the outside world, stuck with a body and killer. Kurachi took the isolated, closed-circle of suspects situation to its logical extreme as Hoshizono assumes the role of detective with Sugishita as his initially reluctant Watson.

Sugishita at first feels like "he'd been banished from his company to a frigid village with a gigolo," but, over the course of Hoshizono's investigation, begins to appreciate "the the brain behind his professional playboy front." So without an impossibility, dying message or tidy alibis to investigate ("...nobody has a perfect alibi"), they concentrate on the suspects and physical clues. And how! Hoshizono makes a lot about the three distinct lines of footprints going, or leaving, Iwagishi's lodge and the murder weapons. There is, what appears to be, a crop circle directly outside the lodge and a second murder involves an improvised "burglar alarm" that didn't work. If you like these in-depth investigations, you're certainly going to enjoy the discussions, weighing of evidence and possibilities – culminating in a lengthy, dizzying denouement. Hoshizono collected from the evidence and information six categories of clues, positional relationship, choice of weapon, alibi, psychological element, physical characteristics and action. One by one, Hoshizono begins to painstakingly eliminate suspects as he explains the murderer's movements and sometimes baffling actions on the nights both murders were committed. Like the creation of the snowy crop circle. Until apparently one person, the guilty party, remains, but there's a twist!

 

 

A pleasingly convincing, logically reasoned solution firmly positioned on, what John Dickson Carr called, a ladder of clues and pattern of evidence deceivingly arranged and logically joined together. In that regard, Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars is a triumph and a minor classic. A no-gimmicks-needed, simon-pure jigsaw puzzle detective novel with more than half a dozen diagrams to help out the struggling armchair detective. While playing absolutely fair in presenting a solvable whodunit, the misdirection was also on point and the honestly titled chapters were indeed about as helpful as a sandstorm in a labyrinth. Very well played!

So, plot-wise, nothing much to complain about, but stylistically and presentation-wise, it has one or two shortcomings. Firstly, if there ever was a detective novel that needed "A Challenge to the Reader," it is this one. It was just conspicuous in its absence here. Secondly, the story itself didn't feature an impossible crime, but the story mentioned an unsolved locked room murder in Hoshizono's backstory and a sequel was teased ("maybe someday, perhaps even someday soon, Kazuo and Hoshizono would journey to that village... to uncover the truth behind the locked room murder from nine years ago before the statute of limitations ran out"). Considering this is a standalone, published nearly thirty years ago, I doubt that case will ever be solved. I hate getting teased with non-existent locked room mysteries like that unrecorded Dr. Fell case of the inverted room at Waterfall Manor mentioned in Death Watch (1935). That and the current title is a bit of a mouthful.

Other than those minor issues, I agree with Ho-Ling that Kurachi's Murders in the Mountain Lodges Beneath the Shooting Stars is a must-read for fans of Ellery Queen and Alice Arisugawa's Koto pazuru (The Moai Island Puzzle, 1989). An extremely conventional whodunit, but a conventional whodunit playing the grandest game on hard mode. A grand performance that makes me wish people like Anthony Boucher and Frederic Dannay were still around to enjoy it. Highly recommended!

A note for the curious: I have mentioned more than once on this blog that it always surprised me that the traditional detective story, particularly impossible crime stories, rarely ventured outside haunted houses, rooms that kill and séance rooms whenever the plot calls for supernatural or otherworldly dressing. An impossible murder around a séance table remains a popular setup, even today, but expanding into other, post-Victorian-era myths and legends could give the impossible crime genre a whole new impulse. I always thought UFOs and everything associated with them is an untapped reservoir of potential for mystery writers specialized in locked room mysteries and impossible crimes. For example, the third story from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 89. You can find another small example in the snowy crop circle from this book, but just as interesting are the UFO cases the characters discuss because some could easily be the setup for an impossible crime story. Cattle mutilations in field with "no human footprints, tire tracks, or any other traces left at the scenes" or two farmers in New Zealand burned to death by aliens in a corn field in front of an astonished witness. Even better is "the Jessica Reid incident" whose bedroom was invaded by "an alien in a silver protective suit" who strangled her husband to death in a handful of seconds when they resisted ("...every shot bounced off the alien's suit"). Only downside to turning that one in a detective story is that the solution is rather obvious.

Midsummer Murder (1937) by Clifford Witting

Midsummer Murder (1937) is Clifford Witting's second novel starring Inspector Harry Charlton, attached to the Downshire County Constabulary, who has to put aside his daily, small-town problems to turn his attention to a curious murder – committed in the town square of Paulsfield. The murder happened during a chaotic moment on a market day, in July, when a bull "intent on its one brief hour of glorious life" got loose and turned the whole market in an uproar. So the sound of a gunshot largely went unnoticed in the pandemonium. What didn't went unnoticed is the man who had been cleaning the statue of a former Lord Shawford dropping dead between the railings and the plinth with a bullet in his head.

Inspector Charlton begins to investigate this strange shooting with all the accustomed thoroughness and plodding vigor of the British police.

They begin to gather evidence, which isn't much, trying to determine the general direction from which the bullet came or hoping to match the extracted bullet to locally issued firearm permits. A whole crowd of witnesses need to be questioned and close attention is being paid to the shopkeepers occupying the part of the square from where the shot was presumably fired. And there's the question of motive. Why shoot "an ordinary working man" who's cleaning a statue? A somewhat unusual case, but an isolated one and nothing too sensational until the murderer decides to make murder a habit.

On the following morning, the murderer kills a second man in the then deserted square and, later in the day, a third man is shot and seriously wounded while sitting in his car – only links are the bullets and opportunistic nature of the shootings. Every time the shooter pulled the trigger, it was during "the psychological moment." Like a bull rampaging overturning market stalls, a passing thunder storm or a deserted street with "no one awake but a nodding night-watchman." More shots would be fired in the town square "before the sniper's reign of terror came to an end." So the newspapers begin to screaming about the Paulsfield Sniper spreading terror in town and making veiled comments regarding the lack of progress the police has made in apprehending this homicidal maniac. Charlton remains undeterred and investigates each crime, "separately and also in relation to the others," with that same thorough and plodding vigor.

Midsummer Murder is not the first Golden Age mystery to revolve around a serial killer, but Witting certainly penned one of the earlier examples and a pretty odd one at that.

The serial killer from the pre-World War II detective novel has always been an odd, often out-of-place character compared to its modern-day counterpart. There are generally three types of serial killers in the classic detective novel: a rational murderer who uses the serial killings as a smokescreen for their through motives/objectives or a genuine homicidal maniac, which always feels out-of-place in a Golden Age mystery – a third type is a combination of the first two. So closer to the serial killers of modern crime fiction. One thing they all have in common is that they lean into the thriller-ish elements of having a serial killer present as panic spreads across the community stoked by sensational headlines blaring about the latest murder. For example, Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepp (1931) and Ellery Queen's Cat of Many Tails (1949) do this very well. However, Midsummer Murder reads like a charming, leisurely paced small-town mystery with a thick dollop of local color, quirky, but well-drawn, characters and some lighthearted humor. There are blaring headlines and the people of Paulsfield began to favor the parts of town "free, as yet, from the murderous attentions of the Sniper," but within a week "everything had returned to normal" as they began to drift back into the square. Even though the newspapers about alarm and panic, the actual description of "that 'orrible to-do in the Square" is very little more than an annoyance to the locals. Like the shopkeepers around the scene of the shootings.

Now I appreciated the calm, levelheaded approach of the police and the town to the presence of a sniper indiscriminately picking people off in the market square, but it strikes a false note. And a missed opportunity. Witting put on the local color thickly and it would have made for a great read to see a rural town, where "everything seemed so ideally peaceful" under the midsummer sun, getting paralyzed as everyone locked themselves away in their sweltering homes. But without that element of spreading fear and terror, Midsummer Murder comes across as an overwritten, drawn out novel that badly needed trimming in order to expand the ending. Midsummer Murder ends abruptly and not in a good way. Nor something that justifies taking the long way round to get there. The story begged for something better and more substantial to end on.

I don't think the story's shortcomings would have bothered me half as much had Witting not been so cute by constantly acknowledging those shortcomings with such lines as "it will be as well if local colour is not laid on too thickly at this early stage in the story" or "overstock this story with characters." Even worse is the sudden ending in combination with that closing line (ROT13), "jr xabj gung gur Qrgrpgvba Pyho, haqre gur cerfvqrapl bs Ze. R. P. Oragyrl, qb abg yvxr znq zheqreref, ohg gurer vg vf." Without those comments, I would have taken Midsummer Murder as an interesting, well-intended curio of the Golden Age serial killer novel similar to Brian Flynn's experiments in The Edge of Terror (1932) and Reverse the Charges (1943). Witting knew what the story lacked and simply didn't appear to care. Just wanting to write the story, whether it worked or not, and joking about it. I can forgive a lot from a mystery writer when they have something to show in the end, but not being cute and empty handed. So the conclusion annoyed me to no end.

That being said, I did enjoy Charlton trying to grapple with the problem of a serial killer, "these are not natural crimes," while admitting ordinary police methods can have its limits with an indiscriminate killer. And trying to anticipate in which direction the solution is headed. Other than that, the least satisfying of the Witting reprints so far. Catt Out of the Bag (1939), Subject—Murder (1945) and Let X Be the Murderer (1947) are all infinitely better detective novels. Murder in Blue (1937) is better written than plotted, but would even place that one above Midsummer Murder. Well, you get the idea. I'll try to pick something good for the next time.

Prelude to Revival: The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Novel in the 1980s

In "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime in the 21st Century," I attempted to give a brief rundown how the impossible crime genre, especially the novel-length version, went from a dormant state in 2000 to the budding revival of recent years – realizing too late that the attempt was premature and incomplete. First and foremost, I should have simply waited until 2025 as it would have given a clearer picture of recent developments and a larger sampling of this new batch of locked room specialists. I also realized too late that I unfairly brushed over the fact that the story of today's locked room revival has a not unimportant prelude. I first need to retrace my steps from the previous post.

Robert Adey wrote in the preface to Locked Room Murders (1991) that the post-WWII impossible crime novel experienced a sharp decline with John Dickson Carr being "the one writer who continued to concentrate his powers almost exclusively on impossible crime novels." John Russell Fearn diligently carried alongside his favorite mystery writer, but his work existed in relative obscurity until recently. I pointed to the 1981 selection, "A Locked Room Library," as a perfect illustration of the rut the impossible crime novel found itself in during the second-half of the previous century.

There were, however, occasionally flareup over the decades. During the 1960s, Helen McCloy suddenly became interested in locked room puzzles and produced the superb Mr. Splitfoot (1968). Paul Gallico wrote two novels earlier in the decade in which his paranormal investigator, Alexander Hero, exposes locked room trickery behind seemingly supernatural phenomena in additional to several one-offs – like Kip Chase's Murder Most Ingenious (1962), Charles Forsyte's Diving Death (1962) and John Vance's The Fox Valley Murders (1966). At the time, they were the last spurts of an apparently dying genre as the only one who made a splash in the 1970s was John Sladek and his two locked room classics, Black Aura (1974) and Invisible Green (1977). The miracle crime continued to thrive in short story form in publications like Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, but novel-length locked room mysteries had become a niche. Then something remarkable happened.

The 1980s saw an explosion novel-length locked room and impossible crime novels, but even more remarkable is that it happened in four different countries, across three continents, under vastly different circumstances and outcomes. One of those outcomes has put its stamp on the budding locked room revival we're seeing today.

The first stop is the United States where the resurrected locked room mystery came out guns blazing. I got the idea for this eighties retrospective from an apparently unremarkable, largely forgotten mystery, Phillips Lore's Murder Behind Closed Doors (1980), which one of only three novels starring a multi-millionaire attorney, Leo Roi. Murder Behind Closed Doors turned out to be not as unremarkable as first expected as Lore valiantly tried to string together a quartet of impossible crimes. Only the solution to the first murder in the locked coach house is noteworthy, but Murder Behind Closed Doors unwittingly set the tone for the American locked room resurgence of that decade.

A year later, Bill Pronzini's Hoodwink (1981) sends his "Nameless Detective" to San Francisco's first ever Western Pulp Con to root out a blackmailer, but ends up having to crack a tougher nut when a man is shot in a hotel room – locked from the inside. Even better is the second murder in a shed sporting one of Pronzini's most creative locked room-tricks and inspired clueing. Pronzini was only warming up. Scattershot (1982) is an interlinked short story collection and a sequel to Hoodwink following the nameless detective around during a regular working week, which turns disastrous by inexplicable disappearances, impossible thefts and a murder behind locked doors. So three in total and five all together with the previous novel, but Pronzini added one more to the tally. Bones (1985) has nameless digging into the death of a pulp writer who supposedly shot himself inside his locked office thirty years ago. I suppose a case can be made to add Shackles (1988) to the list as one plot-thread certainly can be taken a reverse locked room mystery, or locked room escape, but not everyone's going to agree.

If you add Pronzini's short stories from the period, such as "Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?" (1980) and "Booktaker" (1983), it's not difficult to see why his name became synonymous with the American locked room mystery with Hoodwink being his flagship impossible crime novel. However, there's another reason why Hoodwink perfectly represents this period of the American detective story/locked room mysteries. It appears that convention culture of the 1970s and '80s was a source of inspiration for some of the decades more unusual mysteries (e.g. Sharyn McCrumb's Bimbos of the Death Sun, 1987). Richard Purtill was a philosophy professor and a fantasy/science-fiction author who wrote an incredibly fun, curiously overlooked impossible crime novel, Murdercon (1982). The story takes place at a fantasy and science-fiction fan convention where two people die under bizarre, inexplicable circumstances. One victim is "zapped" to death by Darth Vader, while the other is pushed from a window by an invisible killer.

Pronzini's Hoodwink and Purtill's Murdercon form a complimentary set of locked room mysteries, which both do something differently with a somewhat similar premise. I consider them to be highlights from this period, but the best was yet to come.

Herbert Resnicow was a civil engineer, life-long reader of detective fiction and locked room fanboy who, upon an early retirement, decided to write his own detective novels and was rewarded for his debut, The Gold Solution (1983) – nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The book concerns the seemingly impossible murder of a well-known architect in his fortress-like, top floor apartment. While not the best or most original of his locked room mysteries, The Gold Solution is a blueprint for the way in which Resnicow would go on to handle the locked room problem. Resnicow drew on his engineering background to create large scale, three-dimensional locked room-tricks and produced two classics of its kind. The Gold Deadline (1984) stages an impossible stabbing in a locked, guarded theater box during a ballet performance and The Dead Room (1987) brings the locked room mystery to the dark, multi-level anechoic chamber of a hi-fi company. Impressively, the solutions are as original as their setup promises and the absence of diagrams and floor plans do not take away from the tricky solutions or confuse them. You can easily imagine the crime scene and spin them around in your mind to understand the tricks. The Gold Curse (1986) and The Gold Gamble (1989) aren't bad either, but not nearly as good or original as The Gold Deadline and The Dead Room. Resnicow was at the time a much needed, innovative voice to show you can teach an old dog new tricks. A shame nobody took note of them at the time.

However, the same year The Gold Solution was published, Marcia Muller embarked on her only solo-locked room mystery, The Tree of Death (1983). Funnily enough, it takes a similar approach as the murder is committed inside a locked museum protected with burglar alarms. Another one-off worth mentioning is Ellen Godfrey's Murder Behind Locked Doors (1988) in which the server room of a data processing/software company becomes the scene of a suspicious death. And the solution is tailor made to suit the situation.

There are, of course, more examples, particular in short story form, but these are the most important, and brazen, examples. A near decade-long Fourth of July celebration after a four-decade drought, but the fireworks fizzled and died down by the time the 1990s came knocking.

Next stop is England, jolly old England, where the locked room revival of the 1980s was conducted quietly and covertly. So cloak-and-daggers instead of fanfare with fireworks. Douglas Clark is a prime example. A former executive of a pharmaceutical company and a once hugely popular mystery writer of retro-GAD mysteries, but camouflaged his plots as police procedurals with ingenious poisoning methods and medical conundrums. So quite a few of his impossible crime novels have been overlooked like Golden Rain (1980). A novel that never once acknowledges that the poisoning of a school mistress is an impossible one. Plain Sailing (1987), on the other hand, concerns the death of a man by fast acting poison alone on a boat out at sea ("one of those locked room mysteries"). Clark's best contribution remains the much earlier Death After Evensong (1969) about a man getting shot point blank by a bullet that vanishes as if by magic. I wish Clark had written more retro-GAD novels in the vein of Death After Evensong or Plain Sailing.

Someone who was more open and brazen when it came to declaring his colors was a staple of the UK library system, Roger Ormerod, which allowed him some freedom to pen traditionally-plotted mysteries. At the time, it was not a route to commercial success or getting paperback deals, but it gave fans today something to rediscover and enjoy. And how! Ormerod dabbled in impossible crime fiction before the '80s (e.g. The Weight of Evidence, 1978), but really started to make work of it with More Dead Than Alive (1980). A modern-day Harry Houdini vanishes from a tower room blocked from the inside by a heavy magician's cabinet and galore of false-solutions, which get demolished as quickly as they're proposed and the correct explanation is daringly original – rediscovered today in certain closed circles as a minor classic. Ormerod produced an indisputable classic only a few years later. Face Value (1983) is not so much a retro-GAD novel as it's a proto-type of the Japanese shin honkaku mystery, presented as a character-driven crime novel. In 1983, the whole shin honkaku movement was still in its infancy and took place behind a language barrier. Ormerod, always willing to experiment, created exactly such a type of mystery novel out of thin air! Ormerod continued to write detective novels, thrillers and locked room mysteries throughout the '80s and '90s, but none as good as Face Value. One of the best, traditionally-styled detective novels and locked room mysteries from the post-WWII period! Amazingly, the phrase locked room mystery or impossible crime is never uttered by any of the characters!!

The last Brit deserving to be highlighted here is the champion of the historical locked room mystery as imagined by John Dickson Carr and Robert van Gulik, the historian Paul Doherty. Doherty debuted in the mid-1980s with the locked room mystery Satan in St Mary's (1986) representing his first, tentative steps as Doherty would go to prolifically write historical impossible crime novels right up to this day. During the late '90s and '00s, Doherty was the only British mystery writer who made impossible crimes his specialty. Doherty's locked room mysteries are generally overlooked, because they're historical mysteries.

Across the channel, in France, Paul Halter appeared on the scene with La quatrième porte (The Fourth Door, 1987) to boldly claim the mantle of John Dickson Carr. The Fourth Door is a classically-styled mystery full of bravado as a body miraculously appears inside a sealed attic room and an impossible shooting takes place in a house surrounded by a carpet of virgin snow. Halter handled both impossibilities like an expert and remember the solution to the no-footprints problem being quite original, but, similarly to Doherty, Halter wrote most of his locked room novels and short stories over the next few decades – including most of his best work. However, despite the technical nature of the locked room-trick, La mort vous invite (Death Invites You, 1988) has its admirers as does Le brouillard rouge (The Crimson Fog, 1988). While gathering a cult audience over the years, Halter has not inspired others in his country to pick up the proverbial pen to help him revive the French Golden Age detective story of Stanislas-André Steeman, Pierre Véry, Noël Vindry and Herbert & Wyl. So, for all his devotion, Halter remained an isolated voice in the genre until his locked room novel started to get translated into multiple languages. Halter's masterpiece La montre en or (The Gold Watch, 2019) even had an international premier as the English, Japanese and Chinese translations preceded the original French publication. Things played out a little differently in Japan.

You know the story by now. A century ago, Edogawa Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan and began to experiment with the possibilities, e.g. "Yaneura no sanposha" ("The Stalker in the Attic," 1925). That evolved into the Western inspired honkaku (orthodox) mysteries of Seishi Yokomizo and Akimitsu Takagi, but had to make way for Seicho Matsumoto and the post-war shakai-ha (social school) movement. The character-driven, socially conscience crime novel gained popularity during the 1950s and remained the dominant form of crime fiction for several decades. However, the 1970s saw, what's called today, the "Yokomizo Boom" in which the Kosuke Kindaichi series was rediscovered and flourished into a multi-media franchise. It ploughed the ground and planted the seeds for what was to come.

Soji Shimada's picked up where the greats of the past left off and created a blueprint for the shin honkaku (new orthodox) mystery with Senseijutsu satusjin jiken (The Tokyo Zodiac Murders, 1981) and Naname yashiki no hanzai (Murder in the Crooked House, 1982). Unlike Halter, in France, Shimada only had to wait a few years before others took the ball from him and ran with it. Yukito Ayatsuji's Jukkakukan no satsujin (The Decagon House Murders, 1987) is generally regarded as the official beginning of the shin honkaku movement with writers like Alice Arisugawa, Takemaru Abiko, Rintaro Norizuki and many others following suit – effectively reviving the genre and bringing about a second Golden Age. A movement who completely revitalized and rejuvenated the classically-styled detective story with their college aged detectives, eccentric architecture and corpse puzzles. They have been at it ever since. During the mid-1990s, Natsuhiko Kyogoku's Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume, 1994) and MORI Hiroshi's Subete ga F ni naru (Everything Turns to F: The Perfect Insider, 1996) started the second shin honkaku wave by moving away from bizarre buildings, remote villages and isolated islands to couch the traditionally-styled plots in specialized backgrounds and subject matters. While they're at it, the likes of Yamaguchi Masaya's Ikeru shikabane no shi (Death of the Living Dead, 1989), Takekuni Kitayama's Rurijou satsujin jiken (The "Lapis Lazuli Castle" Murders, 2002) and Masahiro Imamura's Shijinso no satsujin (Death Among the Undead, 2017) have been exploring the possibilities hybrid mysteries have to offer for a potential third wave. Why not. It's not like we're doing anything with it. Not to mention it has spread to every form of media in Japan and leaking into the main stream. Or the success of Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series that's comparable only to Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie.

So they did everything right and the story doesn't end there. A century after Rampo introduced the Western-style detective story into Japan, the Japanese shin honkaku mystery is now journeying west. Just like Ayatsuji's The Decagon House Murders marked the beginning of the shin honkaku movement, the 2015 LRI publication of the eagerly anticipated English edition started the translation wave. More importantly, the translation wave has already began to influence the Western locked room revival. I noted before there are two very different strains of modern impossible crime fiction develop in front of our eyes. On the one hand, you have the more traditionalists, Anne van Doorn, Tom Mead, J.S. Savage and Gigi Pandian, who can be linked to the reprint renaissance. And on the other you have a group of mostly independently published writers who can be aligned to the translation wave. Such as A. Carver (The Author is Dead, 2022), K.O. Enigma (Bunraku Noir, 2023) and H.M. Faust (Gospel of V, 2023). James Scott Byrnside and Jim Noy's The Red Death Murders (2022) fall somewhere in between. If things continue to develop along these lines, the shin honkaku-style is going to help shape the Western locked room mystery of the 21st century, nearly a century after Rampo! Sometimes history really does rhyme.

This drawn out drivel is not as coherent as imagined. The point is that the post-WWI era saw a sharp, world-wide decline in locked room mystery novels as it beat a retreat to the magazines where it continued to thrive in short story form. Even in Japan.

I noticed that Japanese locked room novels published during the reign of the social crime novel where either hidden away in historical mysteries or mostly forgotten about. For example, Sasazawa Saho's fascinating sounding Kyuukon no misshitsu (The Locked Room of the Suitors, 1978) which would have been forgotten had it not been mentioned in a famous Japanese guidebook on locked room mysteries. So this dark age persisted until the 1980s when, all of sudden, the lights went on across the world and it's not always clear why. Why and how the Japanese shin honkaku mystery subsisted and grew from a niche into a staple of Japanese crime fiction is clear enough, but no idea how it happened in the US or why it died down after barely a decade. Why did Halter remain an isolated phenomenon, but Shimada's locked room mysteries founded a whole new movement? What are the odds it happened on three different continents almost at the same time? Almost like something was hedging its bets hoping it would succeed somewhere or, more likely, an interesting combination of circumstances that happened to throw up a best case scenario in the Japanese detective story – not to mention a "what if?" situation. What if Pronzini's blending of the hardboiled narrative with actual plots and Resnicow's blueprint for large-scale locked room murders were carried over into the next decade? Could the US and by extension the West have had their second Golden Age twenty years ago with the locked room mystery as its flagship? Japan shows it's theoretically possible, but then again, they're more generous in catering to niche audiences in the hope it grows into something profitable. So maybe not. I have not forgotten about the Brits, but the traditional, fair play British detective story (impossible or otherwise) is never going to be restored to its pre-WWII status without another Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie.

So, to cut a long story short, genre history is interesting and a good excuse to mount your hobby horse to rant on about half-formed thoughts. So, hopefully, I still managed to arrive somewhere coherently and assure you the whole timeline was clear and orderly in my mind. So, beside the possibility of World War III, I'm curious to see how things are going to develop and play out over the next ten years. I think doing one of these retrospectives in 2034 has now become something to look forward to.